Migrating a VMFS or NFS-based VM to a vVol-based VM

From the Web Client VMs and Templates inventory pane, right-click the VM to be migrated and select Migrate from the dropdown menu to launch the Migrate wizard.

Select Change Storage Only to migrate the VM’s storage, or Change both compute resource and storage to migrate both storage and compute resources.

In the ensuing Select storage step, select a vVol datastore as a migration target. Optionally, select a storage policy for the migrated VM to provide additional features. (The section titled o_vvols_user_guide_storage_policy_based_management.html describes storage policies.)

Click Finish (not visible in vSphereView 135) to migrate the VM. If original and target datastores are on the same array, the array uses XCOPY to migrate the VM. FlashArray XCOPY only creates metadata, so migration is nearly instantaneous.

If source and target datastores are on different arrays, VMware uses reads and writes, so migration time is proportional to the amount of data copied.

When migration completes, the VM is vVol-based. Throughout the conversion, the VM remains online.

The array view below shows a migrated VM’s FlashArray volume group.